Environment, Health, and Place in Global Perspective: Conference at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, April 2002

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Proposal AbstractGreg MitmanEnvironment, Health and Place in Global Perspective: Conference ProposalThis project is a two-day workshop-style conference devoted to "Environment, Health, and Place in Global Perspective," in April 2002 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The conference aims to bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars drawing from the fields of environmental history, history of science, history of medicine, the social studies of science, and medical geography to explore the relationships between environment and health from a global perspective. One of the central theoretical questions of this conference is to explore how considerations of materiality, environment, and place can contribute to new historiographic perspectives within the history of science that move us beyond debates generated by social constructivism and its critics. A companion purpose of this conference is to discuss questions and frameworks that link the local to more global and comparative historical narratives.Through the 1990's, many creative contributions to the history of science, as elsewhere in science studies, have revolved around the sociocultural dimensions of scientific work. These explorations, whether of scientists' language, practices, or social relations have been attacked for neglecting the material engagements and interventions of science, as well as scientists' own, often more naturalistic accounts of what they do. Over the last few years, within the history of science itself as well as within neighboring fields such as environmental and medical history, scholars have grown impatient with the ideological polarity of these debates. Largely granting the constructivists' points about the importance of society and culture to natural knowledge, these scholars have sought new ways of reconciling these insights with a greater appreciation of the material dimensions of science. Within the history of science, this trend has led to a growing appreciation of the importance of geography and place in scientific work and in this and other fields, of the ways in which histories of place or environment both involve and invoke the human body. This conference will bring together individuals from each of these fields to discuss and chart frameworks for this new methodological terrain toward which they have been converging. Organizers also hope to steer conferees toward international comparisons and questions. Topically centered upon the history of environment, place and health, conference participants include scholars whose work ranges through two centuries and across America and Europe as well as the Third World. The case studies reexamine older world-scale narratives, such as colonialism and modernization, often invoked in the history of science and its disciplinary neighbors. Organizers also anticipate discussion about newer ones like globalization, which have sparked scholarly interests but whose implications for the history of science and these other fields have been less explored.